Scars
by Tairako
Summary: After arriving in Zanarkand, he had to do the impossible and connect with a small boy who'd just lost his mother. But perhaps they had more in common than he suspected.


DISCLAIMER: No, I don't own. Wish I did, but I don't. Simple as that.

AUTHOR'S NOTES: This was written mostly stream-of-conscious. Hoooooray for getting inspiration back! Anyway, if you see any typos, please let me know so I can fix them.

Dedicated to squigglebat on LJ for asking where the hell all the pre-game fic went (sorry it's not fluffy, but it just happened that way!), and to Lisa for being awesome and helping me get "in touch" with this guy, even if she didn't know she was doing it.

(Soundtrack - "Crawling Back to You," by Tom Petty, off the CD _Wildflowers._)

o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o

It wasn't at all like funerals in Spira.

Here, there were no summoners to send the dead to their rests on the Farplane, there was no desperate hope that the loved one not become fiends. There was only grief: grief at the loss of a life, a life that was ended much too soon through her own grief, a never-ending, vicious cycle that eventually claimed all it could touch. The people in the small gathering place – he still wasn't sure what it was called – were quiet, some brushing tears from their eyes or leaning on their friends, as if to solidify the feel of them in their minds and keep them tied to the earth. They unconsciously avoided him, moving out of his way as he drifted through the crowd without even realizing he was there. It was a talent he had developed over the years, and he put it to use now to avoid disturbing the solemnity.

In the front of the room lay a casket, he supposed, though not the same as the ones he was familiar with. Instead of being vaguely body-shaped and stamped with the familiar symbols of Yevon, there was simply a box, a very elegant box whose use was nonetheless very well known to him. She lay inside, thin hands folded across her sunken stomach, her reddish hair with none of the luster he'd heard about so often, but her expression one of ultimate peace. She'd left this world convinced she would rejoin the one person she couldn't live without.

She had no idea how wrong she'd been, how long it would take her to find him.

But that wasn't a truth for now, nor would he ever be able to explain it to her. He didn't know if he ever could have, anyway; the tale was too fantastic, too astonishing to be believed unless one had actually lived it, and died in the living.

How long would it be before the war began? He didn't know that, either. He hadn't even heard a whisper of Bevelle, his homeland, in the month since he'd arrived. He wasn't a fool; it was easy to see at a glance how different this place was from everything he was familiar with, and he had to make himself fit in if he was to fulfill his promise. His long hair, grown in his service to Yevon, was quickly shorn; the attention-drawing scar relatively easily hidden behind a pair of "sunglasses." Fortunately the money was the same, so he was able to obtain a place to stay fairly easily; he needed somewhere to keep his sword, as people tended not to carry weapons inside the city limits. The machina frightened him at first, but the stamp of betrayal at the end of the pilgrimage had left him open to learning new ideas, open to adaptation and acceptance, and he slowly eased into the way of electric lights and alarm clocks. He'd become notorious around his apartment complex, as he'd learned it was called, for his reticence to use many machina, but the hecklers left him alone. They could tell he wouldn't put up with any nonsense.

So it had taken him a full month to develop and change, to become someone accustomed to his surroundings again. A month lost, a month in which the child could have gone anywhere, the wife could have left the city, but it had been necessary. But he'd been too late for her.

But there was more, the bulk of the promise. That was what he was at the funeral to find, was why he'd braved the displeasure of her friends – no family but the boy, sadly – to come, a stranger, to a small, quiet gathering of mourning to take the boy from them if he had to. To fulfill his promise to a friend he hadn't wanted and would have died to save. The least he could do now was save his son from the same fate as his wife.

There was a small garden through a pair of large glass doors; not much of a garden, just a few potted trees and bushes with some smooth pebbles pushed around their bases. Zanarkand was beautiful in its own way, but it wasn't a city of nature. Still, the small space was quiet, and private, and open to the stars. It was where he found the boy, sitting on the steps that descended into the little area.

The child wasn't much to look at; small, as he'd said, with a mop of light brown hair. The glimpse of his face that was visible through the door's glass showed that he resembled his mother more than his father; his face was more fine-boned, less rugged, and his eyes were startlingly blue. He would never be as powerfully built as his father, but it would look wrong on his frame. Perhaps one day he'd be tall, and strong, and fast, everything his father had ever wanted for him, but at the moment those blue eyes were trained at the ground, and it was impossible to mistake the expression of barely-suppressed, quiet rage that was nearly burning a hole in the ground near his feet.

Though he opened the door silently, something tipped off the boy and he whirled to his feet, trying to both glare at the intruder and blink away the tears that had been brimming in his eyes. Someone, a neighbor perhaps, had managed to stuff the boy into clothes that were clearly uncomfortable and hard to move in, and he nearly overbalanced as he quickly raised an arm to scrub at his eyes before returning his glare to the new arrival. "What d'you want?" His voice was young and scratchy, petulant and resentful; he hadn't wanted to be found where he was.

"You're Tidus, aren't you?"

"What's it to you?" was the immediate response, and he barely managed to suppress a sigh. This was his son, all right.

"I knew your father."

The choice of past tense was deliberate; whatever Jecht was now, it was certain that he was no longer himself, what had made him that irrepressible trouble finder who wore that name as a badge of honor. And the reaction from the boy was exactly what he'd expected; Tidus's eyes widened, and then narrowed again into that glare, his hands clenching into fists at his sides. "What about him?" he practically spat, his voice even harsher than before. Jecht had been right about that, as well; there was no love lost between the two.

And now Jecht would never be able to make it right. It was up to him. He nodded to the step where Tidus had been sitting moments before, letting the boy become accustomed to him much as he'd let the city get to know him, by waiting until the proper moment to step in. "May I sit?"

Whatever Tidus had been expecting, it hadn't been that. He hesitated for a moment in mid-glare, unused to the idea of any adult asking _his_ permission, before he nodded quickly and turned away again. It only took a moment for him to make himself relatively comfortable on the concrete, keeping his eyes on the boy all the while. "I'm sorry about your mother," he began.

Tidus reached out with one foot and kicked a stone away angrily, a mannerism he recognized as unconsciously having been taken from Jecht. "What do you care? You didn't even know her."

"That doesn't mean I wanted her to die," he said, still watching the boy's back. "I knew a lot about her, though – you father spoke of her often."

"Yeah, well, he's not here."

"He spoke of you, as well."

Once again Tidus was silent in surprise, though he could feel that there was as much resentment in this silence as anything else. It was very easy to picture the way the boy's mouth would be pressed into a thin line, trying to hold everything inside, exactly the way he didn't normally do things. "I don't wanna talk about him. And I don't wanna hear about him."

He nodded; it was to be expected. "All right." Tidus's look this time was more suspicious and speculative; the right direction, at least, which was away from open hostility. There were hard truths coming at some point in the future, but they didn't have to be tonight, with Tidus so rightfully upset. "Where are you staying now?"

"With Kevan and his parents next door, but I don't know what's gonna happen next."

There were any number of things that could happen to Tidus now, as he probably well knew, but not many that were likely to happen. Discreet inquiries had shown that neither of Tidus's parents had any living family, and most of their friends either couldn't or wouldn't handle the raising of an energetic, rambunctious boy, despite the fact that it would mean control of Jecht's sizable bank account. The most likely outcome would be for him to be placed with one family around the city at random until there was a lucky fit, but that wasn't anything anyone wanted to hope for, either.

"How old are you?" Tidus's voice interrupted his thoughts.

"I'm twenty-five."

"And how'd you get that scar?"

Even with the sunglasses, it was still visible, and he didn't want to hide it completely. It was his own personal reminder of everything that had happened, everything he'd gone through to arrive at this point, talking to a seven-year-old in a makeshift garden a thousand years before he'd been born. His own personal guarantee to Tidus to fulfill his promise.

"I was in a fight."

Tidus didn't need to know everything, after all.

The boy's eyes widened again, but this time in appreciation, and he was glad he'd been able to distract him from his grief for a little, at least. "Really? Cool."

He shook his head. "No, it isn't. But it's mine to bear."

"But I've been in a lot of fights, and I don't have one like that. Why not?"

Tidus couldn't see them, couldn't see the scars on his own heart. It was doubtful anyone could but him; it would have been impossible for him to see them without Jecht showing his own to his friend, something he was sure the blitzball player never did. Every fight between father and son had hurt them both a little more, and Jecht's scars had only begun to heal on his journey.

There was no telling how long it would take Tidus's to heal.

He stood again, making Tidus tilt his head back to still see his face, half-hidden by the folds of the collar of his coat. "This was a fight I hope you never have to be in."

"Why not?"

Rather than answer, he walked away a step or two before stopping, tilting his head back to look at the stars. They were the same as the stars above Spira in his own time, giving him a little comfort in this strange city. "Tidus, I have a question for you. I want you to answer me honestly."

Apparently he was unusual enough for Tidus to be interested; the boy moved around him so he could see his face again, watching him curiously. "What is it?"

"If you don't have anyone else… I'd like to take care of you."

Silence fell between them once again; the boy had looked down, surprised by the offer and unsure. It stretched for several seconds, a minute, a minute and a half, as Tidus thought about this sudden proposal. "…Why?" he finally asked, still not looking up.

"I promised I'd watch out for you." It was simple; it was the truth.

Tidus didn't answer for several minutes. From the propped-open door came a sudden sob as one of the women broken down at last and began to cry long and hard for her dead friend; a male voice, indistinct, spoke to her, its tone comforting.

Then, suddenly, from inside, came a slow, tentative, yet clear voice, beginning the hymn. The Hymn of the Fayth, that had been a part of his life for so long, was joined gradually by a multitude of voices that filtered through the crack between the door and its frame, muddled by the glass but still distinct. In a flash he knew what was happening; this funeral wasn't simply for her, but for him as well. Their friends, more hers than his, were laying the pair to rest together, as she would have wanted them to.

Tidus scrubbed at his eyes again quickly, almost furtively, as if he were ashamed to let anyone see his weakness. With as many times as Jecht had referred to him as a crybaby, he probably _was_ ashamed, if only because Jecht had made him so. But now wasn't a time for recriminations or remonstrations, and he simply waited until Tidus looked up at him again. "What's your name?"

It was sad, how this child was willing to go with a perfect stranger, rather than anyone he knew. But it was a new start.

For both of them.

"Auron."

Tidus kept his eyes on his face for a moment, and then nodded. "I'll go with you, Auron."


End file.
